Nintendo Updates the LTD Sales of Switch, Breath of the Wild, ARMS, & More

How well is Nintendo Switch performing as of June 30th, 2017? Nintendo has finally updated their figures as the first quarter of the current fiscal year comes to a close and boy, do we have a lot to talk about. For starters, here’s my little video on the results:

Of course, not everyone wants a video report, so here’s the full breakdown plus the official press release, courtesy the fine folks over at Nintendo Everything:

Net sales: ¥154,069 million ($1.38 billion), 148.6% increase YoY

Operating income: ¥16,208 million ($145 million)

Profit: ¥21,260 million ($190 million)

Total Switch hardware: 4.70 million

Total Switch software: 13.60 million

Total 3DS hardware: 67.08 million

Total 3DS software: 335.10 million

Total Wii U hardware: 13.56 million units

Total Wii U software: 99.97 million units

Switch hardware: 1.97 million for the quarter

Switch software: 8.14 million for the quarter

3DS hardware: 950k for the quarter

3DS software: 5.85 million for the quarter

Smart Device, IP related income: ¥9,062 million

Nintendo’s earnings share from Pokemon GO (share of profit of entities accounted for using equity method): ¥3,286 million

Nintendo made $81 million from smartphone games that aren’t Pokemon GO

Nintendo made $29.4 million from Pokemon GO

During the first quarter of this period (April through June 2017), for Nintendo Switch, we released Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in April to favorable response, selling 3.54 million units worldwide. ARMS, released in June, is also off to a good start with 1.18 million units sold globally. In addition, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, released in the previous period, has also continued to perform well, selling 1.16 million units worldwide (3.92 million units on a cumulative basis). Altogether the sales volume for Nintendo Switch hardware and software during this period came to 1.97 million units and 8.14 million units respectively.

For Nintendo 3DS, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia was released in Japan in April and overseas in May and has been a popular title. Hardware sales were 0.95 million units (1% increase on a year-on-year basis) and software sales were 5.85 million units (31% decrease on a year-on-year basis).

As there were few new types of amiibo compared to the same period last year and few new titles offering amiibo functionality, amiibo sales were approximately 1.60 million units for figure-type and approximately 1.30 million units for card-type. In our digital business, sales of the digital versions of packaged software and downloadable content on Nintendo Switch showed steady growth, with total digital sales of 11.0 billion yen (41% increase on a year-on-year basis).

For smart devices, many consumers are continuing to enjoy Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes, which were released during the previous fiscal year. Our smart device and IP related income was 9.0 billion yen (450% increase on a year-on-year basis).

With this background, we had an operating profit of 16.2 billion yen and an ordinary profit of 30.9 billion yen against net sales of 154.0 billion yen (of which overseas sales were 113.8 billion yen or 73.9% of the total sales). The profit attributable to owners of parent for this quarter was 21.2 billion yen.

For Nintendo Switch, we are planning worldwide releases for Splatoon 2 in July and Super Mario Odyssey in October, and there are several big titles from other software publishers planned for this period.

For Nintendo 3DS, we are launching New Nintendo 2DS XL across the globe in June and July as a new addition to the hardware lineup. On the software front, we are releasing Hey! Pikmin worldwide in July, and we plan to release Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon in November. There are also strong third-party titles on the way for Nintendo 3DS.

In addition, Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Super NES Classic Edition is a compact recreation of Super Nintendo
Entertainment System, which launched in 1990, and it features a collection of 21 titles selected from the rich library of Super NES games. We plan to launch this system globally in September and October.

In our smart device business, we will introduce new game applications while also focusing on continued operations for our released applications so that consumers can enjoy playing them for a long time.

There is no revision to the financial forecast for this period originally published on April 27, 2017.

Nathanial Rumphol-Janc

A veteran in the video game media sphere, Nathanial co-founded Gamnesia, founded MetroidWiki.org, ran the news the segment on the Zelda Universe Podcast, found and ran Zelda Domain from 1998 to 2006, and built Zelda Informer as the Editor-in-Chief from 2008 to 2017. He now owns and operates Nintendo Prime. You can follow him on twitter @NateJanc, otherwise just stay tuned at Nintendo Prime for more of his work.